What are the barriers to mobile app development?

The demand for mobile apps is exploding and enterprises are adopting mobile technologies at an unprecedented rate. However, organizations and mobile app development teams struggle to keep themselves updated with the ever-emerging technologies so that their app finds absolute relevance in today’s time of fast paced developments in technology.

Rapid evolution in the technologies makes it even more difficult. Earlier, an app update was called for comfortably after a months’ time, however now, the need arises in just a day or two. If you are not swift in taking an action, your app stands the risk of turning dysfunctional.

Also not surprisingly, costs and skills gaps are the biggest inhibitors to mobile initiatives but here are some more common barriers for Mobile initiatives.

Measurement

Surprisingly many companies still do not understand what happens with their mobile apps after users download them. Most companies care about the number of downloads, but they overlook more important indicators, such as ROI, user engagement, recurrent usage, time spent using the app, and acquired revenue.

Time spent and user engagement reveal how useful a mobile app is for the user and helps discover the best content to make users “stick” to their screens. The recognition of behavior patterns can also open up new opportunities to mobile app developers. Ignoring the Mobile Analytics that can provide you this kind of information can cost your user adoption and monetization strategies going forward.

Improper planning

Consumers have dozens of apps installed on their devices, only a tiny fraction of them are used regularly. For this reason brands need to be strategic rather than reactive in their app design and distribution. Smart planning is essential. Learn in this on-demand webinar proper planning and rapid prototyping for paving your way to successful mobile strategy.

Consistency across all mobile devices

The challenge of device fragmentation has immensely split the digital marketplace, owing to the regular release of brand new devices of all form factors adding to the challenges faced by app developers. Virtually, all app developers today are working without knowing their target platform. Whereas a customer expects consistency and similar user experience across all mobile devices when he/she installs an app. Native apps to build for each platform are not only expensive but quite resource intensive and time consuming. Cross-platform mobile app development platforms have been quite successful to combat this barrier.

Defining a clear use case for your mobile apps:

A lack of understanding of customer needs is one of the biggest barriers to mobile projects. Organizations need to move beyond tactical mobile apps to a more strategic approach to development, deployment, and management of those apps. Reduce the complexity of developing and managing multiple apps—across varied device platforms—and connecting to many data points and back-end systems.

In the end: Developing customer-facing enterprise apps comes with a myriad of challenges. Sourcing and keeping talent is even more difficult as the skill sets required to develop, deploy and maintain products aimed at customers are in high demand and hard to find. Keeping up with customer demands and mobile technology also requires organizational change, evolving to build a culture of continuous delivery – a completely different approach than traditional waterfall methods and not typical of enterprise processes. Tackling these challenges means addressing them early and including the risks in your mobile strategy to ensure they don’t affect product delivery and success.